An Intro to BookBub Ads (Insights From NINC 2016)

Wanting to dabble in BookBub Ads? This is a great article from this year’s NINC. Enjoy!

BookBub’s partners know us in the context of Featured Deals. But BookBub now offers more than just a single marketing channel to our author and publisher partners. In our workshop at this year’s Novelists, Inc. conference (slides below), we focused on explaining the differences between Featured Deals and BookBub Ads in order to help our author partners determine when, why, and how they should think about using each marketing tool. Our new BookBub Ads platform is not yet available to all our partners, but it will be in the coming months, so we hope this information is helpful even for those of you still on the waitlist.

Featured Deals provide authors with predictability. Most of you are familiar with the Featured Deals process: We decide which books get selected (and have strict requirements for what can be submitted), we determine the category (or which readers you’re reaching), we choose the timing, and we quote you a price. Having this control allows us to fairly accurately predict how Featured Deals will perform. We’re able to charge fees intended to generate positive ROIs, and we know the majority of partners will be successful.

On the other hand, BookBub Ads provide authors with flexibility. We’ve heard from partners for years that they want to reach BookBub’s audience with different kinds of book content, and we launched Ads to address this pain point. With Ads, you can advertise whatever book you want. It doesn’t have to be discounted or meet any of our other Featured Deal requirements. You decide what runs, when it runs, how often it runs, what your ad looks like, which readers you’re reaching, and how much you want to pay. That’s a ton of control.

The downside to flexibility is that the onus is now on you to make your campaign work. Flexibility means Ads won’t work for everyone. It will work best for partners willing to test and optimize their campaigns. We will continue to evolve the product to help you run successful campaigns, but Ads will always be more hands-on and more variable than Featured Deals.

The value is that you now have another marketing channel in your toolbox, and when BookBub Ads work, they can be enormously powerful. You’re now able to reach BookBub’s millions of active, engaged, hungry book buyers with any book you want to promote. The power is in your hands. Now, as Tim Gunn would say, it’s up to you to “Make it work!”

The presentation below is from the workshop we gave at NINC on how to run successful Ads campaigns. Browse through the slides for some key takeaways, and please remember that BookBub’s Partners team is always available to help. We’re here to work with you on your marketing strategy and help you get as much value out of our partnership as possible. So please feel free to email us at [email protected] any time!

Note:If you’re interested in running a BookBub Ads campaign, you can join the waiting list using the form at the bottom of this article or on the right side of this page. We’re only able to support a small number of advertisers at this time, but we’re busy expanding capacity, and in the months ahead we’ll gradually invite members of the waiting list to use the tool.